Magic 101: Force and Free Will
Starting this entry with the standard proviso: do not practice alone. You need someone to look you over, with enough experience to help you if you get in over your head. If you intend to practice magic, find a teacher.
One of the conceptual hurtles people find more frustrating is the idea that not everyone has the capacity to practice magic, and that an interest in magic does not mean you can (or should) practice it. Even the knowledge of magic and magical techniques does not confer that capacity, which I’m going to call force. You can be an excellent magical historian and a walking dictionary of herbal correspondences, but still not have the ability to enforce your will on the astral or spiritual planes, nor the ability to attract the attention of the various spirits which are a part of magical practice in vodou. You can have the capacity to enforce your will and the ability to attract the attention of those spirits, but lack the judgement or discretion to prevent yourself from being taken advantage of, which will waste or divert the force you have available.
There are several components in the force, the capacity to practice magic. This blog is on the first, an innate capacity to enforce your will on the astral or spiritual planes. This is where people often get into trouble—ideas about consent which are popular in many cultures tend to lead people to believe that their ‘no’ to something in those spaces should be inherently binding. People also often believe that they inherently understand the situation and that their consent is informed as a result. Vodou has a lot to say about free will, but it’s enough to say that free will is not the default. Free will is not even common. Spiritual knowledge, or the ability to recognize the situation, is also uncommon.
In magical practice, a lack of free will is going to prevent you from enforcing your will in those spaces, which makes you incapable of being in some of those spaces. It will also leave you open to manipulation and attack in any space you enter, attracting the attention of various hostile or manipulative entities, which will test your will. If they find it inadequate, they will tend to take advantage of that. Many of these entities can be very subtle, and some are wise enough to know that if you don’t know they’re there, they can more comfortably take advantage of you. After testing you and finding that you’re incapable of defending yourself, they’ll make themselves comfortable in as stealthy a fashion as they can, ensuring that you won’t get rid of them and they can continue to make use of you. You’ll have an encounter, think it’s over, and go about your life, all the while carrying something that will slowly warp the conditions of your life to produce situations they find amusing or nourishing.
Generally speaking, most people have a ‘no’ that is about as binding as a sheet of wet single ply toilet paper. Even people who seem to be authoritative in the physical world do not necessarily have sufficient free will to enforce their will in astral or spiritual spaces. CEOs, heads of state, various powerful people in the physical world might be able to tell others what to do, but that does not ensure that their will is sufficient and focused enough to deal with spiritual or astral entities. Recognizing people with that will requires other people with that capacity—people with the capacity to be magicians may be in any industry, social class, of any ethnicity, etc. The closest someone without that capacity can come to identifying people with that capacity is in their apparent self-control.
Generally, a magician with free will has to allow extremity of emotion or action. This is not the same as emotional numbing or suppression: control and bottling your feelings up are not the same.
The capacity to have free will is inborn, if present. If it is present, it must be trained. This is another reason why having a teacher is important. Someone has to walk you through a training regime, with the help of your spirits, to hone that will and focus.
